There comes a time during everyone's SXSW trip when it all gets to be a bit too much. Your eyelids start to close, your belly rejects the 213th piece of fried chicken, and your brain threatens to go loco if it takes in another white 20-something in a plaid shirt discussing The King of Limbs. With this in mind, I probably wasn't well placed when my own personal crash came – at the Pitchfork showcase surrounded by, well, you guessed it. It's testament, then, to the music at Central Presbyterian Church that the two shows I caught became my highlights of the whole week.

Glasser - AKA LA's Cameron Mesirow - didn't so much stand at the altar as sway and pirouette there. On record, this music is hard to pin down, so much so that even party hosts Pitchfork struggled, settling for "tropical pop, tribal percussion, and a couple of different strains of electronic music." Her influences span the globe, but watching her deliver the finished product with such crystal clarity is enough to shake any knackered music hack out of a chicken-induced slumber.

Another girl with a penchant for global pop is Tune-Yards but, again, this music - a combination of vocal loops, colliding polyrhythms, and traditional string strumming - feels like nothing but her own unique creation. Glance around the church and you can tell who hasn't caught the Merrill Garbus live experience before; their faces are awestruck.

Garbus certainly has a charming presence on stage. "You deserve better than that," she says at one point after the giddy combination of rhythms she's constructed to open a song doesn't quite sync. These tiny errors help make the show - proving that this is a human, not a machine, at work. Another mistake occurs during the intro to My Country, the opening track on forthcoming album Whokill, but the song is such an exercise in dragging art out of cacophony - I especially like the skronking TV on the Radio-style horns - that you're left amazed she ever got it up and running at all. Perhaps the highlight of the whole thing was when Garbus falsettoed into such outlandish Minnie Riperton-esque territory that the crowd whooped and broke out into delirious rounds of applause. The audience played its part in the rhythm section too, as each song ended with a well-timed thud. This thud was the sound of a churchload of jaws hitting the floor. A truly religious experience.